First Light on Bare Aspens

First Light on Bare Aspens
“First Light on Bare Aspens” — Morning light strikes the tops of nearly leafless aspen trees.

I came to this ridge overlooking Mono Basin and the Eastern Sierra well before sunrise. My intention was to photograph some extensive aspen groves along with other landscape subjects as the morning light arrived. It turned out that I was too late in the season for these aspens — I should have remembered that their drop leaves early — so I worked those other subjects as sunrise began to light up the terrain.

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Autumn Cascade

Autumn Cascade
“Autumn Cascade” — A Sierra Nevada creek descends a steep chute past autumn colors.

If you have been following recent posts, I may be starting to sound like a broken record. But here, again, I photographed a subject that I had not noticed until very recently, even though I’ve passed by scores of times and likely looked straight towards it without “seeing” it.This small cascade descends from the heights of an Eastern Sierra canyon. In my defense, there’s a lot of other stuff to see nearby, and the cascade is only visible from a rather small location.

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A Fallen Leaf

A Fallen Leaf
“A Fallen Leaf” — A flallen leaf on a walkway in Bath, England.

While out for a walk in Bath, England, I happened to look down and see this damaged green leaf sitting in a vortex of the weathered and eroded surface of the walkway. I’m not necessarily one to read overt messages into photographs, but if you enjoy searching for metaphors you may be able to come up with a few that seem relevant to this image.

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Aspen Thicket

Aspen Thicket
“Aspen Thicket” — A dense aspen thicket, with few remaining leaves.

One of the advantages of returning to the same subjects over the years is that this gives your vision for them time to evolve. Here I speak not just of aspens in general, but of this particular grove of trees. Some years ago, while photographing a different nearby subject, a large grove further up the hillside caught my attention. It posed two challenges. First, getting close to the grove would be extremely difficult. Second, it always seemed to have lost its leaves when the other trees I came to see were at their color peak.

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.